Finding happiness and living through love?
Dear John,
What keeps you on track to finding happiness and living through love each day? How do you avoid getting derailed with the stresses of life that surround us?
Dear Staying Focused,
With so many distractions in today’s busy world, this question is more pertinent than ever. The first step to moving through any obstacle is acknowledging and naming it. Your intent and commitment to finding happiness and living through love is setting you in the right direction. Knowing you can, and will, be derailed is equally important when anticipating and acknowledging the difficulties of life.
To explore this topic, I will have to deconstruct and recontextualize it. Staying on track requires many things: faith, discipline, and grit amongst other things. When challenges and obstacles arise, nurturing your resilience to persevere is pivotal. The quest to find happiness, love, fulfillment, contentment and joy is as unique a task as any. One person’s paradise may be another one’s hell. However, there are principles that can guide us along the way. This question could be expounded on to make a book, which they have, but I will try and keep my answer focused, tangible, and practical.
First, what is happiness and love? Happiness is a fleeting, ephemeral emotion and relatively superficial. For me, it evokes a materialistic pursuit, i.e. feeling happy when the latest Netflix series is released or when you try a new restaurant. Happiness is the transitional goal, a means to an end, but it is not the journey. For love, there are a multitude of definitions and interpretations that vary by person and perspective. People typically love to their greatest capacity, which can be as big or as small as your experiential basis and level of consciousness. This is evidenced by the hedonistic, earth-shattering “love” we may feel as teenagers or young adults, only to look back at a later age with disbelief. Through time, maturity, and perspective, our definitions and ideas around love grow. Sometimes with the people we choose, and sometimes without them. This is often how people grow together or grow apart.
Happiness and “love” can also have a dark twist. Finding happiness and love was a driving thirst throughout my addiction. Instead of getting derailed by stress, I avoided it entirely through distraction, numbing, and pleasure-seeking. Inevitably, stress was stockpiled away, fueling the well-spring of shame that supercharged my addictive behaviors. My finding happiness and love was not an act of moving towards, but rather a fear-based position of moving away from shame and pain. It was inauthentic, misguided, and delusional. My perspective was anchored in pain, shame, and victimization. This occurred because I was fragmented, looking for quick doses of anything that resembled happiness and/or love to fill the voids. I was a house without foundation, unsupported by anything with real strength. You cannot grow or build upward without a foundation or pillars of support.
Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote a book with Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy. Joy, in my humble opinion, perfectly encapsulates the notion of finding happiness and love. The reason I love “joy” so much is because it is both the means and the end; it’s finding gratitude in the journey. According to Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, joy is composed of 8 pillars: 1) perspective, 2) humility, 3) humor, 4) acceptance, 5) forgiveness, 6) gratitude, 7) compassion, and 8) generosity. There are two major influences that affect these pillars as well: community and education. Without a community, we are unable to explore consciousness or these pillars as there would be no relationship. Without education, we’d be unable to grow or change our perspective and understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world.
To be continued...check back next week for the finale, Part 2 of this exploration.
With love and light,
John Moos, MD